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On Photography
Brief Description
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A new edition of Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography—its problems, politics, and possibilities. "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed," Sontag writes in the opening pages of On Photography, which went on to influence...
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On Photography
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Description
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
A new edition of Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography—its problems, politics, and possibilities.
"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed," Sontag writes in the opening pages of On Photography, which went on to influence generations of theorists, film critics, and readers everywhere. Originally published in the 1970s, her groundbreaking collection remains uncannily prescient and profoundly precise.
With her singular searching eye, and her refusal to buckle under received wisdom, she presents a rousing critique of the functions of imagery—to seduce, to advertise, to evoke, to commemorate, to conspire, to conceal—across six essays. The result is a damning portrait of the ways we use imagery to manufacture reality and authority that feels as if it were written today.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781250374745
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 15 April 2025
Country: United States
Imprint: St Martin's Press
Audience: Tertiary education
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 18.0mm
Width: 135.0mm
Height: 208.0mm
Weight: 181g
Pages: 224
Collections
About the Author
Susan Sontag was the author of four novels, including The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and nine works of essays, among them On Photography, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. In 2001, Sontag was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work. She died in New York City in 2004.
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